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Postbag question by Ivan Tobias: What are the biggest misconceptions you’ve found building other people’s LinkedIn profiles that other LinkedIn experts perpetuate?
Can your LinkedIn profile URL reveal your account’s age?
LinkedIn newsletter analytics and visibility
Full transcript
Are LinkedIn newsletters in trouble? That’s what we’re looking at this week in episode 505 of the Informed podcast.
Hi, everyone. I’m John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast, an independent show all about LinkedIn best practice.
Thank you again for all of the wonderful questions that were submitted for last week’s bumper Postbag. We’ve got a shorter Postbag this week. Let’s get started.
It’s a text question this time from Ivan Tobias. So, here’s the quick background on this one. Ivan has written in and said:
I work in YouTube building channels for businesses, and I see so many experts on YouTube putting themselves forward, selling generic courses and promoting themselves as experts when they’ve only really grown their own channel. And they show that as proof. And sure, some of it is proof, but what works for one doesn’t necessarily work for others in a different niche. You can only know this if you’ve worked with multiple businesses, made mistakes, and learned from and adapted.
I can see a similar thing on LinkedIn. There are many LinkedIn experts here, but it seems that many of them are living off the back of their own personal LinkedIn profile.
So, my question is this: What are the biggest misconceptions you found building other people’s LinkedIn profiles that other LinkedIn experts perpetuate?
Thanks for that question, Ivan. I would start by saying you never can quite tell how good someone is until you really actively engage them.
For all the recommendations and stars and word of mouth and all that stuff, until you get into it with them, with your specific set of circumstances and what you need from them, you can’t really tell how good someone is at their job, I think. So, that’s my baseline on that.
But in terms of what I see, sometimes you see people just are very obviously chasing trends because they just want to get their numbers up so that it makes it look like that thing that they were learning was worth the time.
I don’t necessarily like to do that because sometimes you get lost in chasing trends and you don’t necessarily convey what your true identity is.
What is it that you want to be known for? Not necessarily just being a trend chaser and sometimes selling too big of a promise. You just promise something amazing to try and get people through the door, and that’s not really what you’re able to deliver.
So a bit of modesty is good, I think, but that’s clearly not for everyone. They just want to shout from the rooftops how great they are and put their follower count in their headline, and that kind of stuff I don’t like.
Sometimes you see people encouraging others to cut corners by doing things like joining engagement pods so that you can ramp up your visibility. That goes against LinkedIn’s rules, so you shouldn’t really do that kind of thing. And other times, you see people will say, you can make 150 connections per week without getting into any trouble and you can send however many direct messages, so let’s just go and connect with as many people as we can and spam your offers out and maybe 1% of those people will be interested and you’ll make more money next month.
Again, it’s just not for me. And there’s probably a load of other things you just can’t tell on the surface what people are being advised to do, but maybe they’re using automation in some way, other stuff like that goes against the terms of service.
I often joke that when I train people, I say I’m giving you quite “unsexy advice”. Most of it is really about defining who you are and what you want to stand for and what you want to be known and remembered for and then just kind of turning up for long enough for that to make an impact on your intended market, which isn’t the most out there idea.
It’s kind of slow and sensible, and it does work, but it might not be as eye-catching as what some other LinkedIn trainers perhaps tell people. Although I’ve got to say I know loads of LinkedIn trainers – a lot of them are in my Espresso+ community – and very many of them take the kind of sensible, scientific, don’t over-promise, like loads of people I know do the right thing.
So, it’s not as if I’m saying I’m the only one who knows what he’s talking about and everyone else is talking rubbish. That’s not true at all.
But it is also the case that kind of, since maybe since post-Covid time, there’s a lot of people who are new to the platform who are going around kind of purporting to be real LinkedIn experts and they necessarily might not be, but it’s very hard to tell who really knows their stuff and who doesn’t.
Like I said earlier, until you actually engage them and then maybe you get some great advice or maybe you get burned and you have to go to someone else. So, it’s a tricky one.
But it’s interesting that you’ve had the same kind of issue working in YouTube. It’s probably the same for everything, isn’t it? Anything to do with consultancy, it’s always going to be a bit of a hit and miss affair as to who you get and what they tell you. But thank you for the question, Ivan.
The other item is sort of for the Postbag, except that no one asked it to me directly, although I did see a couple of people asking about this out loud on Threads with relation to ageism in the hiring process.
Someone was saying, can your LinkedIn account joining date be worked out from your profile as a way for recruiters or potentially hiring corporations to exclude you because they think you might be too old for a job? I thought that was an interesting question.
I don’t work with jobseekers at all, but I thought from the technical point of view, let’s consider whether this is possible.
If you just look at a LinkedIn profile URL, you don’t get any impression of the age from that. My LinkedIn profile URL just ends in my name. You can’t work out anything from just seeing a name.
But there are a couple of ways of seeing or working out when someone has joined LinkedIn. The first method is just to go directly to someone’s profile.
If you tap the More button, there is an option that’s called “About this member”, and that will show you the month and year when someone joins. So, it’s pretty easy to see that straightforwardly.
But I was wondering in this scenario where maybe corporations would be assessing hundreds of candidates and they’d want to do that automatically as a way of maybe filtering people out.
Is there a way of doing it then? Because this menu that I’ve just talked about is something that you would manually browse to, and I don’t think there’s an automated way of getting there and extracting that information, but under the hood there actually is.
If you look at the source code of any LinkedIn profile, so say you’re on your desktop or your laptop and you’re browsing a LinkedIn profile and you right-click anywhere on the page and hit “View page source”, there’s a load of code that comes up, which is the stuff that is building the page. And in there is there’s a variable called memberId, which appears on the page many times.
If you were to do a search for memberId and find the very last item that comes up, that will tell you the person’s member number. And that member number is unique for everyone.
And these are basically sequential, so the smaller your number is, the longer ago you joined LinkedIn.
Mine is in the 34 millions and I joined in November 2008.
With that data, an automated process could basically work out roughly when you joined LinkedIn and could maybe potentially use that to exclude you from an interview process.
It sounds very dark to me that someone would do that, but who knows, maybe it happens.
I should say as well though that there are other things, if I were doing something as evil as that, there are other bits of data that I would look for. I’d look for when you graduated, for example, because we’ve got relatively good correlation between that and how old you would have been at the time. And therefore you can work out how old you are now. So, there are other ways of doing this.
One of a bit of information I come across recently via colleague in the Espresso+ community, Mic Adam, was that the data download, so the archive that you can get of all of your information from LinkedIn, now starts putting your own member number on some of those files, which it never did before.
The next time you go and download all of your data from LinkedIn, you might start seeing that number there, which is a little interesting.
This past week I’ve noticed that I’m able to add bold text to my shortform LinkedIn posts, which has never been possible before.
This isn’t really baked into LinkedIn. It was discovered by someone else and I was able to replicate it.
So, what I did is I typed some text into my email composer screen on Apple Mail and then I made that text bold and I copied it into a LinkedIn post and sure enough, that bold text appeared in the composer and then it stayed there after the post was published, which means that you can combine bold and normal plain text in a post.
Not everyone has got the feature. If you’re trying this and it doesn’t work for you, then I guess you need to be patient.
But perhaps it’s not really an intended feature from LinkedIn. It’s not documented anywhere; it’s not in the help files. Some people can do it and some people can’t, and it does feel a little bit temperamental at time.
You might be thinking, I can already put bold text into LinkedIn posts because I can just go and grab fancy text characters from other sites. And yes, you can do that, but that text isn’t fully accessible, so things like screen readers can’t read those characters properly. And it won’t necessarily be text that can be found by search engines either, because it’s not real plain text characters.
So, this alternative method of pasting in bold text from somewhere else, if it works for you, is good because it actually turns it into proper bold text that is accessible and that is searchable.
You can’t use the same trick for other types of text formatting, so you can’t use italics or underline, for example. And you can’t apply this trick in LinkedIn comments or in your profile anywhere. It’s only in shortform posts.
I’ve done a post about it so you can see an example and you might want to play around with it yourself. I think it’s a nice little thing, but because it’s possibly not an intentional feature, it might just disappear as quickly as it arrived. I don’t think necessarily we can rely on it too much.
But there we go. One for you to check out a possibility that you can use bold text finally in your LinkedIn posts.
The biggest issue I’ve reported on in the past week has definitely been around LinkedIn newsletters. Those are the longform pieces of content that you can have subscribers of, even if they don’t already connect or follow you on LinkedIn. And that’s where you can write the equivalent of blogs on LinkedIn and they will go out to your subscribers.
Or at least that’s the plan. A number of people came back and said, I’ve been looking at my newsletter analytics and I’m seeing that my email open rate is 0%. And I had enough bits of feedback that it made me contact LinkedIn and they did say that there was some kind of issue that they were looking at.
I thought, OK, well that’s standard stuff goes wrong.
But then LinkedIn replied afterwards to say actually they’ve changed their mind and that email open rate analytics stat is just not reliable enough for them to keep using it. And therefore they’ve decided that from 9 October. So, that’s yesterday as I record this that stat is just being removed altogether.
So, it wasn’t reliable enough and they’re getting rid of it. That’s not a great start.
The bigger problem that people then came back to me and said was that OK, we haven’t got that stat, but they were convinced, given the number of subscribers they had, that numbers were going down in terms of just who was consuming that content.
They’re getting fewer responses and less evidence of clicks. And just generally people were not seeing the content to begin with. And when I questioned LinkedIn separately about that, the response I got was that visibility on the platform is going up. And I these things don’t sit well with each other.
I’ve written a newsletter on this topic, which I thought was ironic that I’d be writing something that potentially no one would see.
It’s got a decent number of comments, and it’s had a decent amount of visibility.
I’ve got about 17,000 subscribers on my LinkedIn newsletter. About half of those people will have been sent an email, according to my analytics. And the responses say that some of them did receive that newsletter via email. So, I know that at least some people are getting that content.
But my experience, and the experience of pretty much everyone else I’ve spoken to, is that newsletter visibility is down for LinkedIn.
What are the consequences of that? Well, if you’re building your platform on the rented land of LinkedIn, then it’s hard to really rely on reliable visibility.
The alternative that I would suggest is to make sure that you’ve got a communications channel that you can have true confidence in, because you own that thing. And the obvious route there is to have your own mailing list through something like Mailchimp or MailerLite.
I use the latter so that you can reliably email people and then have a platform that you control that you publish your material on. So, a website with a blog is a great place because it’s your domain. You’re in full control of what goes on there. And I’ve got that on my website as well.
I do publish a lot on LinkedIn because I’ve got a lot of followers there. But it is frustrating when you think, well it might be a big number, but if not many people are seeing it, then does it really make any difference? This might be the time for you to think about having your own owned channel, if you can, if you haven’t already set that up.
But this isn’t to say that newsletters are dead, because the real upside of LinkedIn newsletters is that LinkedIn as a website domain is a very highly trusted by other sites. And LinkedIn gets cited in search results and in answers delivered by AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude. And so having your content in a longform article or newsletter on LinkedIn is valuable for the discovery potential from people doing Google searches and asking AI various questions and that could potentially lead new customers to your door who wouldn’t otherwise have found you.
So, whilst on one hand it is frustrating if you can’t reach your existing subscribers reliably anymore, the other side is potentially you could find lots of new customers, and it would be shame if you kind of gave up on that altogether and just stuck to publishing on a much less well-known platform just because it’s a little bit more reliable for its email sending and so forth. So, one for you to consider.
Read my newsletter episode on analytics and visibility
Lots of interesting bits of feedback in the comments on that one. And who knows where this is going to go.
Some people have observed that, maybe if you pay for newsletters on LinkedIn in some future scenario that visibility restriction will go away and the email delivery will be much better.
These things could happen because something like that probably could make LinkedIn a lot more money. But I don’t know. I haven’t had any kind of intel on that so I have no idea if they are planning anything like that. I would hope not. But you never quite know.
The finances are always the thing that determine what they do at the end of the day. So, we’ll see. And if I’ve got any major updates then I will of course share that in a future episode.
Keep your questions coming please. I always love hearing from you. Voice notes are preferred, and until next time, I will speak to you soon. Cheers.
